A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.

Who Is This Hornswoggler?

Andrew Wheeler has worked in book publishing for 25 years. He spent 16 years as a bookclub editor (for the SFBC and others), and then moved into marketing. He marketed books and other products for Wiley for eight years, and now works for Thomson Reuters. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day for a year twice. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame sons (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) at an unspecified location in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely and purely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else.

Saturday, May 08, 2010

Today's Book-A-Day is taken from the recent Jason omnibus Almost Silent, like yesterday's. For more on this strategy to creatively fulfill my Book-A-Day pledge, see my post on The Shrinking of Treehorn, from the original Book-A-Dayrun back in 2006-2007.

Tell Me Something is a pantomime graphic novella, or perhaps a set of storyboards for a nonexistent silent movie -- the only words in it are title cards during flashback sequences. (I say "novella," because it's also less than fifty pages long -- a short album even by European standards.) It's populated with the usual nameless Jason characters -- the girl, the bird-man, the dog-man, the poetry editor, the girl's father, a hard-eyed professional killer, and many bit parts and background folks. None of them have any more expression that can be given by having mouths open or closed, eyes looking up or down.

The bird-man was an aspiring poet when he met the girl -- some years ago, in the flashback sequences -- but her father disapproved, and engineered a breakup when he couldn't order his daughter away or scare off her suitor. In the present, she's with the dog-man, when a chance encounter between the bird-man and dog-man rekindles the bird-man's love for her. Jason tells the story backward and forward from the moment of their meeting, and runs to the inevitable end. (It's inevitable in the bleak world of Jason's cartoons -- remember that he's Norwegian, and be happy that this story doesn't have zombies or werewolves to eat everyone in the end.)

I find Jason's work more successful when it has a lighter touch -- the morbid inevitability of his stories needs some humor to leaven it, and Tell Me Something has very little lightness or humor in it. So it becomes a sad nearly-wordless noir story about some people and how none of them get what they want. Any Jason story is worth reading for his storytelling simplicity and narrative wit, but I'd recommend several things before Tell Me Something (including Meow, Baby!, which comes right before it in this edition).Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index----------------Now playing: Matthew Sweet - Thunderstormvia FoxyTunes